I know that using cheap scale-out components, open-source software and cutting-edge data center design means Amazon can do pretty much everything more cheaply than typical enterprises. But they can't do it free! Where's the floor? And at what point are margins so thin that they start to hurt? Plus, they're getting IT used to these prices. How do you go up without churn?

Amazon boasts that this is its 40th price cut since launching EC2 in 2006, a relatively meaningless statistic. The question is, cut prices where and how much? In this case, the answer is on the competitive storage front. AWS cut EBS block storage by 50%. Remember, Google dropped I/O charges and cut its Persistent Disk prices 60% on Dec. 3 in a bid to get into more serious contention for cloud custolmers. Persistent Disk is Google's equivalent to EBS.See http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/google-compute-cloud-challenges-amazon/d/d-id/1112900. So is Amazon, with this move, making life difficult for competitors. Or should it be more worried about investors?

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.